(Wallace stands over the dust-blanketed bed, cap in hand,
regarding the bones of Julian Weatherbent, fingerbones still wrapped around a coral
scarf.Hoarsely he says, “He had nobody
to take care of him in old age, and nobody to bury him.No wife anymore, and no son.”Outside we hear the steady thunk of Jake and
Don digging in the soil that I thawed for them, carving out a grave next to
that of Muriel Weatherbent.

I lay a hand on his arm.“He made his choices, Wallace.He
could have left the island for the mainland and started over, maybe even
married again.He had a boat—he could
have gone to another country completely if he’d wanted to.”

“No, he couldn’t.”As we speak
George comes up silently, folds the blankets and the sheets around the body,
and starts to sew them up; easiest way to move the loose old bones.“Not being who he was.He would hold the course.”And Wallace scoops his father up in his arms,
made light by time, out to the plank awaiting by the grave, torn from a
now-useless shed.“He didn’t take to
change.”

“We can always change who we are,” I say to him, but catching
George’s eye, as I follow them out the door, into the raw and blowing weather.)

Cold and warm.I feel cold air move across my face, but warm
quilts pile over me.I feel strangely
clean.Not rested, but resting, a good
thing, I guess. It feels like it should be good.Maybe it is.

I can sit up.I can see the new clothes that I wear, a
mottled tiedye of blue and gray and white: sky-camouflage.I can eat whatever they give me: small dabs
in a cup every hour to accommodate my shrunken stomach.They’ve been doing that for awhile; I just
haven’t bothered to open my eyes.

But now I do.I can look about me and take in my
surroundings.Another cave, very broad,
very horizontal, and plenty of headroom, though so much wider than tall that sometimes
one feels like it hardly offers much at all.I study the striations that arch over and around me.The geography must incline to that general
pattern, folds of metamorphic rock thrust up into the sky; I’ve seen it before
somewhere. And nothing but sky greets my gaze out there in the long slash of
opening.Everything in here echoes
faintly, almost unnoticeably.

The place looks
well-organized.It has shelves and
chests and bureaus arranged as makeshift rooms; their condition shows that they
have weathered in this not quite indoors, not quite outdoors existence for years
on end.The cave has a kitchen equipped
to handle large numbers, full of mismatched crockery and baskets of food,
utensils, or what have you.The cave
holds many, many crates.It has a privy
crack that I have some vague, embarrassing memory of visiting under escort, and
probably other offshoots as well.And
somewhere I hear a rumble of water underground.I’m sure I’d appreciate it all much better with a bit of leaf, but I
sort of know without asking that nobody’s going to give me any.

And by some miracle I don’t
mind.The body wants it, the body begs
for it, but something happened better than the leaf.I’m not damned anymore...am I?I feel like coming back to life. I don’t
quite remember what might have left me feeling that way.I don’t ask for this miracle to make
sense–it’s not supposed to.I just prop
myself up against some sacks of nuts or beans, I’m not sure which, burlap
wrapping so many round, hard little things that they add up to soft, and that
doesn’t make sense, either, and I don’t care.

I climb to my feet, pulling
a nearby fur-lined robe over myself as soon as I leave the quilts.The stone feels chilly to stocking-feet.My legs shake for a moment under me, the
muscles in pain, but then I get them right and totter to the opening.Quite a ledge extends beyond our perch, as
wide as any rich man’s veranda, though ragged at the edge.And beyond...

Oh my lord what a view!

Mountains, ice-silvered
mountains, sparkle in the setting sun as far as the eye can see–and most of
them below us.That’s what takes my
breath away–I have never gone so high without a flit.That’s when I realize that my nose aches from
breathing in the cold, thin air.Because
I see the perpetually snow-capped peaks of those few spires that approach our
height, to the left and right.And
beyond them sky, so much sky!Pure,
dizzying blue above the drifts and seas of cloud that blush in rose and apricot
below my feet, lapping around the mountains like a misty tide hurled up against
steep islands!

My breath clouds too,
ragged exhalations, my Mountainfolk lungs working their hardest with the
limited material at hand.And suddenly I
smile–my ancestors evolved precisely for this, right here.My hands press against my ribcage, feeling it
expand and contract.Something, at
least, works just as it should.

(Oh my mountains–Oh my
beautiful mountains!Too long have you
teased me, just out of reach. But now, as I pack my gear for the climb of a
lifetime, I tremble with the thrill of the greatest mountain of them all,
beckoning me at last, to explore all of her mysteries.Here are the pitons, and here are the ropes,
here are the grappling-hooks, and I will tame you, my lovely, or die in your
embrace at the attempt.)

Then, with halting,
less-than-steady steps I make it to the edge.I don’t know whether I have regained my levitation power or not.I don’t know how much distance I could
plummet and still use my powers to break my fall even if I do have something
left.And yet I feel so accustomed to
ignoring fear–nay, chronic terror!–that my toes poke over the very brink before
I stop, swaying on my wobbly legs.

(Nothing you can do will
frighten me away, my darling, for I will mount you.I will explore your ways.I will reach your peak as no one else has
ever done.I will plant the Charadocian
flag upon you, and the Peshawr family crest, and you will kneel beneath me,
your king arrived at last!)

From here I can see the
road that winds below. What a vantage to command it from!

“That’s the smuggler’s road,”
Cyran says behind me, “We’re on the far side of the pass, by way of a tunnel
that Father Man found.Technically,
we’re in Stovak, not The Charadoc anymore, though of course the mountain-range
still holds the name.Now come back from
there, Deirdre, before we all lose our lunch just watching you.”

(At last, all dreary
politics aside, General Aliso has secured the pass, and now nothing can hold me
back from you, my beautiful Mt. Maitreyya, Queen of all Mountains.And I will get the verification that all the
world demands, to hail you as the tallest point in the world!)

I turn and look up,
astonished at how much farther still this mountain climbs, beyond our little
naval in her belly.Good lord–where are
we?The vertigo makes me stumble, but
Cyran catches me in time, and then I stare at all of my friends, gaping on in
horror.Among them I see Makhliya—oh,
thank God!Thank God she made it here
alive!Father Man must have whisked her
to safety even as he did us.

As I hobble back with
Cyran, e says, only a little shakily, “Welcome to Merchant Caverns!Smugglers have used this cave for
generations, for all manner of transactions before the final plunge into our
country.They still do, actually.And they seem willing to favor us in future
business, since we protect them from government patrols, not to mention promising
to lift the more impractical bans upon their merchandise–particularly those
bans set to protect the monopolies of a few Meritocrats who, for some strange
reason, won’t be able to afford to pay nearly as generous a tax this year.”

(Here’s the thick alpaca
socks, for frostbite threatens in the heights the whole year ‘round.And here’s the ultra-warm long-johns of True
Silk laced throughout with fine silver filaments, smuggled all the way from
Rhioveyn by way of Stovak.I’m sure
Uncle Pio will forgive me for my little dent in his monopoly.)

Well, that explains why we
seem to have become so well-provisioned of late.“And the Meritocracy doesn’t know that
they’ve taken possession of a now worthless pass?”

“I wouldn’t call it
worthless,” Cyran says softly.

“Nooooooo!”The man runs past so fast that I don’t
recognize him at first.Others tackle
Damien right before he reaches the brink, while he wails and weeps and claws
after death.Now more join in dragging
him back from the ledge, inch by inch, until the mob can grab both arms and
each kicking leg, as he bucks and sobs in their arms.“No!No!No!No!No!”And nothing sounds
musical about his rag of a voice right now, yet it wrenches my heart more than
any ballad ever could.

For some reason, even in
all the commotion, I hear Daba’oth murmur, “Why weep, O bard?She waits for you in Koboros, in your own
dear home, enthroned upon a song.She
will always await you there, with the child in her arms, until the hour of your
reunion.”I shiver.

Cyran shakes hir head.“I shouldn’t have told people to wait till he
grew stronger to tell him. I should have told him, myself, as soon as I heard
the news, while he still lay too weak to do anything foolish.”Cyran looks at me with red eyes.“I make such stupid mistakes, sometimes,
Deirdre, that I wonder why anybody follows me.”

I nod.“I know how that feels.What should you have told him?”

Cyran winces before he can
bring his mouth to say, “Kanarik...” and then he can say no more, and I don’t
have to hear it, I know the rest of the sentence, the rest of the whole story
without another word.

I sink back onto my mat. I
curl up tight, shut my overflowing eyes against the lying light, clap hands
over my ears against the sounds that seem too normal, too matter of fact.I can’t even think through as to why this
death means more than all the rest combined.

Except, dear God, except
for Tanjin.And suddenly the great
reservoir of nightmare emotions, dammed up till now with greenfire, breaks
through and surges through me, through every inch of me, every tiniest
unprotected cell of me, flooded to
exploding with my tears.

(God bless dear Layne Aliso, for
opening up the pass, safe from smugglers, bandits, and rebel scum, and making
my dreams come true!)